by Nevil Shute
She said, “That must be interesting kind of work.” It was a part of her technique, this art of making men talk about themselves.
He said, “Well, yes, it is. It’s rather lengthy sometimes—you go on for a long time at a thing without seeing any results.” He smiled at her, that shy, revealing smile that he pulled out so unexpectedly from time to time.
“You must feel that it’s something well worth doing, though,” she said.
“Well, yes—it is. There was the wing flutter on the Monsoon in the war.” He started in to tell her all about the research he had carried out into the wing flutter, and the effect of moving the mass of the guns and ammunition boxes six inches farther back upon the chord of the wing. From that she had little difficulty in steering him on to the Reindeer tail.
When Miss Corder came back with the coffee she found them deep in conversation, with Mr. Honey talking freely to the actress. She was divided in her feelings over this; it was her duty to prevent the spread of alarm from one nervous passenger amongst the rest, but at the same time she had been troubled over Mr. Honey. It was pleasant to see him animated and cheerful. She was grateful to the actress that she had done that for him. She went to get another cup of coffee for the little man.
Within a quarter of an hour Miss Teasdale knew a good deal more about the Reindeer tail than Captain Samuelson. She knew more of the background of the story; she knew something about Elspeth, and a little about Shirley, and a good deal about me, as Mr. Honey’s boss. She knew the way the matter had arisen, the urgency with which I regarded it, the sacrifice that Honey had made in leaving his small daughter to the uncertain mercies of a charwoman. Captain Samuelson knew the bald facts of the matter; he knew nothing of the background of those facts.
Miss Teasdale said, “That’s very, very interesting, Mr. Honey. Tell me, have I got this right? You reckon that the stabiliser of this airplane that we’re sitting in is kind of dying of old age?”
He blinked at her. “Well, yes. Yes. I think that’s a very good way to put it. It’s not very old, as structures go, but—yes, it’s dying of old age. In fact, it must be just about dead by now.”
“And when it dies it breaks? What happens—does it come right off the fuselage, so that we’d have no tail at all?”
“I think half would fail first. One side—yes, I think it would come off. I think it did in the first one, the one that fell in Labrador.”
She stared down the quiet aisle of the cabin. “You never think, somehow, this sort of thing can ever happen to you,” she said.
“It may not happen,” Mr. Honey said. “I wasn’t able to convince the captain or to make him land in Ireland. But he did agree to stop the inboard engines. That helps us, certainly.”
She thought for a minute. “How much flying time did you say the one that fell in Labrador had done?”
“1,393 hours.”
“And this plane we’re riding in—how long has that done up till now?”
“About 1,426 hours. I calculated that the tail would fail about 1,440, but it’s not very easy to forecast as accurately as all that. The first one went at 1,393 hours; I’m afraid the only thing that one can say is that this one might go at any time. Dr. Scott intended that no Reindeer should fly over 700 hours until this thing had been thrashed out. But this one’s slipped through, somehow.”
She said, “You told the captain all this, did you?”
He nodded. “There’s no real evidence yet that the captain could act on, I suppose. We don’t know yet that the one in Labrador did crash for that reason. That’s what I’m going out to Ottawa for now. But it looks as if I may not get to Ottawa. They may have to send out someone else.”
She said, “Looks like Mossy Bauer’ll have to look around for a new star for the new picture, too.”
He turned to her. “You mustn’t think of this as certain,” he said. “We may quite well get safely to Gander. I—I just don’t know. I only know that this machine is liable to accident at any moment now. But it might go on like this for another hundred hours, or even longer.”
She nodded. “Say, would it help any if I were to have a talk with Captain Samuelson? I mean, there’s all these other people to consider,” She indicated the sleeping passengers in the other seats.”
“I don’t think it would do any good at all,” Mr. Honey said. “He thinks I’m just unduly nervous, and, really, there is no proper evidence at all yet that the tail is liable to failure. That’s what I’m going to Ottawa to find out.” He outlined to her in detail what Samuelson had done. “I really don’t think it would be much good for you to talk to him. He’s the captain and he’s made his decision.” He hesitated. “And anyway, we must be very near the point of no return by now.”
She said sharply, “The point of no return?”
“That’s the point when it is shorter to go on than to go back,” Mr. Honey explained. “Sort of half-way.”
She breathed. “I thought you meant something different. So you think there’s nothing we can do but sit here with our fingers crossed?”
“I don’t see what else we can do,” he said. “If we were going to turn back we should have done it long ago.”
His coffee came, brought on a small tray by the stewardess, who put it down upon his knees and left them. Mr. Honey sipped it gratefully. If death was near at hand, there were worse ways to meet it than by sitting in the utmost comfort in a warm, delicately furnished cabin, sipping a cup of very good coffee, and talking to a very beautiful woman.
“Say,” she said, “just to pass the time, then, you can tell me what you meant about the Men’s Toilet.”
He coloured and said nervously, “I wasn’t trying to be rude. It’s just that the safest place in the whole aircraft in a crash is sitting on the floor in there. And at the altitude we’re flying, there’d be plenty of time for you to get back there and sit down.”
She stared at him. “Say, why would that be any safer than staying right here where we are—with the safety belts on, of course?”
“Your body gets thrown forward, very violently. If the belt holds you, it could injure you so badly that you’d die in any case. But if you’re facing backwards with your spine and your head pressed up against a firm support, you can stand a far greater deceleration without injury.” He went on to tell her all the details of what she ought to do, as he had told Miss Corder.
She listened to him with attention. “That’s something to know about,” she said at last. “Will I meet you in there when the time comes?”
He hesitated. “I don’t think so. I shall try and get to the flight cabin up forward when—when things start to happen. It’s just possible that I could help the captain in some way.” He hesitated. “I’ve been a long time in aircraft research,” he said. “Something might happen after the tail fails that we could take advantage of, and that the captain might not recognise in time.”
She nodded without speaking. She had been travelling by air for twenty years and she knew a little about accidents. She knew that when a high-speed aircraft crashed those in the flight cabin were almost always killed, whereas those in the tail of the aircraft frequently escaped. She recognized that no one knew that better than Mr. Honey who had sought out the safest place in the Reindeer and told her about it. She realised that this shabby, weak-eyed, insignificant little man who had been discredited by the crew was proposing to put aside the chance of safety and go to the point of maximum danger when the crisis came, following his calling to the end.
“Does anybody else know about this place in the Men’s Room?” she asked. “I mean, is there going to be a run on it? Because I’m kind of allergic to a crowd.”
He hesitated. “I told the stewardess, Miss Corder,” he said. “When—when I thought perhaps you didn’t want to hear about it. But it’s all right—the stove is quite wide enough. There’ll be room for two if you crush up close together.”
The actress said, “That’s the girl who waited on us with the coffee?”
> He nodded. “She was so—so kind.”
There was a silence. Miss Teasdale sat staring up the cabin in front of her, thoughtful and silent. What she had heard bore the stamp of truth to her; in the quiet comfort of this aeroplane she realised that death might be very near. She could take that philosophically, so long as it was quick; with the Atlantic down beneath them it would be so. She would have liked to live, but she had no dependants; and as she sat there she knew that she had had the best of life. She had been born of middle-class parents in Terre Haute, Indiana; when she left school she had gone to work in an insurance office as a stenographer. Then, at the age of nineteen, she had won a beauty competition, becoming Miss Terre Haute; she had gained a screen test and her first job in Hollywood. She had been three times married, but never with success; twice she had created the divorce. The last time she had married Andy Summers, the band leader, and had divorced him after eighteen months; since then she had lived alone. She had never had a child. Twice she had visited her own state in glorious pageantry to start the Indianapolis Motor Race; these visits were to her the climax of a long career. She treasured the memory of them more dearly than her Oscars. She had a brother who ran a flourishing automobile agency in Louisville and a sister who had married an attorney and lived in Norfolk, Va.; she had not seen either of them for many years. When her star waned she planned to rent an apartment in Indianapolis, in her own state where people were proud of her, but she would spend her winters in Miami. There were indications at the box office that that time was not very far off now.
So, if it had to end, she would be missing little but old age and she could do without that, anyway.
Presently, she turned to Mr. Honey. “Why did you pick on me to give me the best seat in the house for this show?”
He said awkwardly, “Well, you’re a very well-known person, Miss Teasdale. You’ve given so much pleasure to so many people.”
All her life she had received compliments; they had become commonplace to her, just things that people said. With death very near, this one struck rather a new note and arrested her attention with its sincerity. She said quietly, “You thought so much about my pictures? Do you go to the movies a great deal?” She had not taken him for an escapist.
He hesitated. “Well—not now,” he said. “I used to go a great deal when my wife was alive. But I’ve gone very little in the last five years. I’m afraid I haven’t seen any of your recent films.”
“You haven’t missed a lot,” she said. “There was more adventure in the picture business in the ’thirties. Every picture that I made had something new about it then. Now—well, I don’t know. Directors seem to have got cautious.”
“That’s what we always said,” said Mr. Honey eagerly. “There was always something new about your pictures. I think we saw everything that you were in from the first day we got engaged right up to the end.”
She asked, “When did your wife die, Mr. Honey? Was it in the war?”
He nodded. “It was at the time of the V.2S—the rockets, you remember. We had a flat in Surbiton.” He stared up the aisle. “It was rather a long way from the factory, but there’s a very good train service to Ash Vale. And there was always something going on in Surbiton: there was the Country Dancing Club and the Art Club and the Camera Club. We did have such fun …” He was silent for a minute, and then he said, “I’d have been at home when it happened, only I was doing my turn firewatching at the factory. I didn’t even hear about it till the morning. Elspeth was quite all right when they got her out—just a bit shocked, you know. But Mary—well, she died …”
She said impulsively, “Oh, I’m sorry.” And then, to keep him talking and to ease the difficulty, she said, “What did you do, Mr. Honey? About Elspeth, I mean?”
“It was a terrible job,” he said simply. “You see, all our furniture was gone, everything we had. We’d only just got the clothes that we were in—Elspeth was in her pyjamas. Of course, everyone was frightfully kind and we got fitted out all right, and lots of people offered to give Elspeth a home in the country right away from the bombing—places in Wales and Cornwall—all that sort of thing. But—well, there were only the two of us, and I thought that sending her away to be with strangers would do more harm than good.” The actress nodded thoughtfully. “So I kept her with me and we managed to get digs in Farnham to start with; there wasn’t much bombing there. And then we got a house, and bit by bit we got some furniture together. I think it was the best thing to do.”
“Who lives with you to keep house?” she asked.
“Nobody,” he said. “We get along all right, Elspeth and I. Of course, now that she’s growing up and can do things for herself it’s getting a great deal easier.”
“How old was she when that happened?” Miss Teasdale asked.
“Eight,” he replied. “It’s bad luck to have a thing like that happen when you’re only eight.”
She breathed, “I’ll say it is.”
They sat in thoughtful silence for a time. At last the actress asked, “Was your wife a great movie fan, Mr. Honey?”
He said, “We both were, for good pictures like yours. We used to pick and choose. But Mary was terribly fond of your films.” He turned to her. “That’s really why I want you to do what I say and go and sit down in the Men’s Toilet if anything happens. You will, won’t you?”
There was a sudden watering behind her eyes. He certainly was the oddest little man. “Surely,” she said gently. “Of course I’ll go.”
He stared past her through his thick glasses. “I don’t know if there’s any truth in what they say in church about meeting people again,” he said. “When the end of the world comes or when you die. Or if it all just finishes. It’s an idea that kind of—helps, to think you’ll meet people again. If it’s true, I wouldn’t want to go to Mary and tell her I hadn’t done everything that could be done to help you. You see, you gave her so much pleasure.”
“I’ll do just what you say,” the actress said humbly.
They sat in silence while the Reindeer moved across the night sky above the overcast, beneath the stars, in steady, effortless flight. From time to time this thing had happened to her before, that she had suddenly been brought face to face with the incredible power of the honky-tonk, of the synthetic, phoney film business. Storey-teller, script writer, producer, director, cameraman, musician, cutter, actors and actresses, all came together for the purely commercial business of creating something that would sell; if they succeeded they created something that would sway the lives of men and women by the million, in all the countries of the world. That happened on the side. It was purely accidental to the business what they came together for, which was to make money.
She had few illusions about her profession; few film actresses have. In the endless, monotonous sequence of takes and retakes on the set she had a faculty for carrying through the emotion of a scene from one shot to another taken ten days later, so that given the proper opportunities by her director she could turn quite an ordinary script into a masterpiece. That, with her beauty, had made star material of her, fit for publicity. She had few other talents; but for that knack she might still have been Miss Myra Tuppen, stenographer in the Century Insurance Office in Terre Haute. At first she had attributed her screen success to her young beauty, but soon she had discovered that in Hollywood beauties were two a penny, and it was years before she got an inkling what it was that differentiated her from all the stand-ins and the walkers-on. When she discovered what it was, that she had a knack that other women had not, a tenuous knack not clearly understood even by herself, she had been terrified for years that she would lose it. That fear had left her now; she had put away a fortune in safe stocks and real estate, and now she did not greatly care if she stayed on in the commercialised entertainment business that had been her life, or not. Sometimes she felt that her life might even have been more fun if she had remained Miss Tuppen of Terre Haute instead of becoming Miss Teasdale of Beverley Hills.
When such thoughts came to her she put them away; they were the discontents of middle age, and she must not be middle-aged while she remained in business. They were nonsense anyway; life had given her everything, everything but children. That was one thing that she had had to miss; her income had been much associated with her beauty, so that she could not afford to run risks with her figure. But treasonable thoughts returned from time to time, and recently she had wondered now and then what would have happened to her if she had not gone into the movies, if she had stayed on in the office. She would have married and settled down and raised a family, no doubt. Whom would she have married? One of her brother’s friends in the automobile business? She hardly thought so. One of the boys she had met in High School—Dwight Henderson? Dwight had been a nice boy; she had heard of him during the war. He was Vice-President of a corporation that made women’s shoes, in New York City. Her mind turned to the Century Insurance Office, well remembered after all these years, all these experiences. It would have been funny if she had married little Eddie Stillson the lame ledger clerk.…
Of all the people in the office, she remembered Eddie Stillson best. His desk was next to hers; because he was a low-grade clerk the noise of her machine was supposed not to disturb his work. She had been seventeen when she went to the Century office from her school of commercial typing; she supposed now that Eddie must have been twenty-one or twenty-two, but at that time she had thought him older. He had a pasty face and he wore steel-rimmed spectacles; one leg was shorter than the other, so that he could not take much exercise, or dance. He wore a sort of iron extension fitted to his right boot. Thinking back now more than thirty years in time, she remembered Eddie Stillson as one of the kindest men that she had ever known.
It had begun on the first morning, her first morning in her first job. At the school the machines had all been modern Remingtons. In the office she had been given a worn-out Underwood. It was just different enough to spoil her work; each time she forgot and worked up speed her flying fingers would depress two keys together or print ½ instead of a stop, so that each letter that she typed was spoiled and messy with erasions. By the middle of the morning she was near to tears of apprehension and frustration, when the office boy put down upon the table by her side a glass of milk and a stick of chocolate.